IASA CONFERENCE FULL PAPER 9

No Man, No Clan: In Search of the Kullark, in a Land called Australia, The Other Mother, through Jack Davis' The Dreamers
I would like to begin my discussion with a tale:
"Ages ago--in the dream-time--many of the beautiful birds and timid animals now living in the bush were men. One day, towards sunset, a tribe of blacks were returning from the hunt, when they met a very old man carrying a long spear and an empty "dilly" bag. When he approached them he placed the spear in the ground as a token of peace, and said: "I have travelled far, my brothers, and many moons have gone since I left the hunting ground of my people. ...went to places where there is neither bird nor beast, and the face of the sun is for ever hidden in a dark cloud. ... Now I am old, and my people are scattered like dead leaves before the wind, and, before I seek them, I would rest with you a while. In return for your kindness, I will tell you the secret of the fire of the sun. He who is brave among you may then bring it to your tribe."... Prite, who was a very little fellow, ...followed Mar over the mountains until he was very weary, and, just as he was about to turn back, he saw the cockatoo take the fire from under his crest feathers. He then returned to the camp and told the members of the tribe that the old man's story was true. The absorbing question was discussed late into the night, and at length it was agreed that Tatkanna, the Robin, should make the journey again, and endeavor to steal the coveted fire. ...When the cockatoo discovered that the fire was stolen, and beyond his control for all time, he was very angry. Taking his nulla-nullas, he went in search of Tatkanna to kill him. ...but he had not been fighting many minutes when he was beaten, and forced to fly into the trees, where he has remained ever since. Mar, the cockatoo, returned to his camp disconsolate. The tribe was very pleased with the robin for his bravery. When you see a red-crested cockatoo, you will remember how fire was stolen from him. He still has a beautiful red crest, and is known as Leadbeater's cockatoo. The robin redbreast also retains his scorched feathers in remembrance of his great feat."1
Jack Davis' The Dreamers coming in second position of the three tales, together called "The First Born Trilogy" tells us about a man, Worru, and his family. We, in our discussion , would try to locate the Australian aboriginal existence through the play in a different light rather than the master-servant / coloniser-colonised avaguard binary-resisting angle. The Dreamers narrates the tale of the unyielding strives of the suppressed, incarcerated and marginalised memory through a significantly aged member, a voice from the innumerable past, the unfathomable dark abyss of a whole way of life, an existence. In the play, two different generations come together: thus, juxtaposing values which are originally at a discord. Worru is an aged person, the patriach of the family who carries an Ancient Australian within him which each and every moment clashes with the school going younger generation who are gradually alienated from the psycho-social prime of the father-figure. The Eurocentric aesthetic eliticism, that engulfs the younger minds, pains the older. The self-valorised universe of diverse Australian characters is lost as we see Uncle Worru reciting in a mild tone:
"Now we who were there
Who were young
are now old and live in suburbia,
And my longing as an echo
A re-occuring dream,
Coming back along the track
from where the campfires used to gleam."2
Davis, in his own words tells us about the conceiving potential and openness of the theme of the play. It can be the story of any clan, any person who has/have suffered a sense of loss of their time and place and space. Davis himself acknowledged thus: "The old man Worru is a conglomerate of three old men I knew as a boy of fourteen years in Moore River Native Settlement."3 He refers to a documentary film to show the extent of his anger, namely A Lousy Little Sixpence. The politics of representation follows the suppresion of a full fledged cultural, ethnic existence with a lifestyle of its own. Here lies our moot point of discussion. Uncle Worru with all his almost hysteric allegiance to a past stands as a foil to his own land with all its present facade. Australia has become an unknown place to him, resulting in a sense of alienation that sparks off an intense anxiety within him. What Worru suffers from, is a tripartite colonial incarceration that thaws any notion of the vitality and warmth associated with the aboriginal ethnographic existence. First, the colonial past, secondly the following neo-colonial ruling set-up and thirdly and most importantly, a microcosmic colonised state of existence that prevails over his own clan, his family members deconstructing his 'blood-tradition'. The terra nullius now writes a history of its own with a linear, self-immolative, mechanical, Immanent hand. Davis' character epitomises a protest against this neo-historical imperialism that propels a forceful mindless assimilationism resulting in a more and more dislocated, rootless existence of the aboriginal clans. But in the process it loosens its hold over the perennial flow of its life force. In an urbanised existence, the indigenous value-system goes astray. To give a reply to the "absolute evil of the native" (To borrow a term from Fanon) the downright reversal of the same theory seems to fail.
In an article in the journal "Modern Drama", Shoemaker defines aboriginality, thus: it is "...the legacy of traditional Black Australian Culture... ...It implies movement towards the future while safeguarding the pride and dignity of the past. But aboriginality is also counter-cultural in European terms: A reaction against the dictates of White Australian Society." In the very first scene, we see uncle Worru standing alone while his family members fade away. The metaphoric significance of this scene is intensified with the presence of a shadowy tribal dancer in the play. The family is mainly run by a matriarch called Dolly who is a responsible mother, while the next-age father-figure Roy, is a drunkard, an escapist at best. He spends the food-resource of his own children on liquor. The children are on their own, they could learn their indigenous customs for a school project like a foreigner. One can feel the ironic reversal of a close-knit familial construct they used to have. The notion of the grand-narrative called clan with all its heroics, a dignified pro-historic past, has evaporated. In its place, a unidirectional, rootless culture has evolved as a rizomatic growth (to borrow a term from Deluze) of the foreign civilization approaches. The Australia of Worru has metamorphosed into a land infested with callous drinking and cruel ignorance to one's own heritage. Worru fails to complete his uneasy steps as he's also "fallen" prey to the "civilised" practice of drinking. Now, what he needs to fight is the "unhomeliness" the "unheimliche" (to borrow the German term utilised by Freud), the known things gaining the status of the unknown. The Ancient Australian world consisted of a mythical history involving a psychosomatic connection with the land, a different notion altogether from the prevailing Eurocentric intellectual one. Davis' drama gives us a glimpse of that mysterious world, however tiny the glimpse may be. The tribal dancer, Worru's "gibberish" bridging the past with the present thwart the bleak reality around them. This post modernist, post-globalised Australia is the "Other Mother" to him whom he could not recognise. This loss of identity flares up a sense of alienation that begets anxiety. Worru's foil now, is the Australia, a land of No man, No Clan. Worru's failure and death leaves us with the fundamental question: Whom to fight? Whom to resist? Is it Robin Redbrest or the Cockatoo? How should we define the fire-thief? What should be his status? A Criminal or a Prometheus?
Davis' play is not always about hardcore "political motivation" in its single-handed sense of the phrase. He himself tells thus: "I didn't set out to write an overtly political play. To confront white and black audiences with a truthful, uncompromised picture of urban Aboriginal life is in itself, political." With the collapse of the meta-narrative, a sense of 'temporal unidirectionality' has faded out. In its place, a hetero existence has sprung up: as a result, the world history is moving away from the dominant social evolutionist account, towards a situation of chaos or one in which, according to the Giddensian notion, an infinite number of purely idiosyncratic histories can be written with the 'h' in small letters: it would concentrate on the journey initiating from Inferno, travelling the Purgatorio and try to navigate towards the culminating point which is evidently a breakthrough from the conventional paradiso of the ancient bard, in a bleak cultural landscape may be, that betrays signs of only a decentered peripheral living.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&x-yt-cl=84411374&x-yt-ts=1421828030&v=QRBMdS4t36c